There's virtually no challenge, but everything in the game takes a long time. It takes forever for towns to grow, it takes a long time to research new stuff, and while you're spending that time fiddling with supply chains, you're constantly being interrupted by pointless optional task popups. There's also virtually no challenge in the game, certainly none from the entirely inconsequential AI opponents. But sure, good for one playthrough.
The people at Failbetter are such masters of their grimdark craft, they've managed to make me lose my actual real life sanity... due to how slow the trains move. And there is no way to improve the speed your craft travels at. There was an overdrive function in 'Sunless Seas', but it didn't make it into 'Sunless Skies', But not only is the game slow to begin with, you'll also frequently encounter headwinds that further reduce your movement speed. Another review astutely noted that, unlike 'Sunless Seas', in 'Skies' you have to navigate a maze of corridors rather than cruising off freely into the unknown. This makes getting from point A to point B take that much longer, and that much more tedious. The game overall is a little easier than 'Sunless Seas', but everything takes longer. Also, the 'Seas' soundtrack was better.
Spent so much time just waiting for research and sailing back and forth around cape horn doing nothing in particular. A lot of crew compositions are non-viable, and it's very possible to make the player character completely useless if levelled wrong. Pirate combat is dissapointingly useless.
Not really a fun game. As far as I can tell, you sit around and watch progress bars fill, or try percentage based actions with long cooldowns. Not very realistic, I was at war with Russia and got nuked 4 times and it really had no effect on much of anything. The AI seems terrible... I think the war I was in would have continued forever (as you can just keep reinforcing your army endlessly in spite of any losses), except it seems I killed all the AI's transport units (required in order to reinforce), and they just never bothered queueing up any more. Paid $6.29, and I realize that wont buy you a heck of a lot these days, but even for that price I can't really recommend it.
This is a game about trying to keep some people from going outside when the temperature is minus 60. They really really want to go outside and die, and you have to stop them.
Gordon Freeman visited a post zombie apocalypse DMV and changed his name to Harry Ham 10/10
Good art and music design isn't going to make up for the actual game being not very good. Lack of gameplay variety, lack of crafting variety, lack of store management nuance, and the writing is kinda poor as well.
A game where you invade personal electronic devices to try to find out who is behind a string of terrorist attacks. Not a bad concept, but Mainlining did it better. The Orwell aesthetic is pretty bland, and being forced to sit through chatlogs and phone calls in 'realtime' is boring. I hoped that the adviser that pops up with an inane comment after nearly every piece of data you collect was only part of the tutorial, but no such luck. I didn't play for the story, which is good, cause it wasn't exactly enthralling. Game was pretty short, and would have been even shorter without having to sit through those annoying faux chat sessions and phone calls.
